Novak, Michael

▪ 1995

      The modern state "is an overpromiser and an underachiever and ultimately a fraud. It is bound to disappoint, to embitter, to divide, to engender corrosive cynicism." These provocative remarks were made by Michael Novak, lay theologian, economist, and political philosopher, at the announcement in March of his having been selected 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Established in 1972 by financier John Marks Templeton, the award—the largest annual monetary prize in the world—was worth about $1 million in 1994.

      Novak's works crossed boundaries in political ideology and subject matter. He supported the presidential campaigns of both George McGovern and Ronald Reagan, was an active critic of both the Vietnam War and the American Catholic bishops' pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and the U.S. economy, and wrote on subjects ranging from ethnicity to sports.

      Novak was born on Sept. 9, 1933, in a blue-collar community in Johnstown, Pa. He graduated from Holy Cross Seminary at the University of Notre Dame, Stonehill College in North Easton, Mass., and Gregorian University in Rome. He transferred to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., in 1958 and left the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1960, within months after ordination as a priest. He was accepted to Harvard on a graduate fellowship later that year and published his first novel, The Tiber Was Silver, in 1961.

      Novak covered the Second Vatican Council for several periodicals in 1963-64 and wrote a major report on the second session, The Open Church (1964). He became a professor of religious studies at Stanford University that year, and in 1967 visited three of his students in Vietnam, where he also served as a monitor of national elections. From 1968 to 1972 he taught at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.

      During the 1970s Novak helped launch the Hastings Institute, a study centre for bioethics, and a humanities program for the Rockefeller Foundation and accepted the post of resident scholar in religion and public policy for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a position he still held in 1994. His writings appeared regularly in both the liberal journal Christianity and Crisis and the conservative National Review.

      By the 1980s Novak was widely considered a "neoconservative," a former leftist now critical of that political perspective. In 1981 he was appointed U.S. ambassador for the UN Human Rights Commission. His 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, was considered a seminal work in the theology of economics; other works include Belief and Unbelief (1965), Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience (1967, with Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel and Protestant theologian Robert McAfee Brown), and The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993). (DARRELL J. TURNER)

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